Jews vs Aliens

by Naomi Alderman

His hand on the Mauser. Refusing to draw, forcing himself to remember that it is not their fault: they are just ignorant, backward muzhiks. They are not the enemy.

  A cry in the night. Heads turning, hands grasping their worn rifles.

  A line of otherworldly shapes shambling towards the encampment, their distortions not the fault of the dancing shadows.

  A creature whose head is a giant clenched fist, the fingers parting to reveal a fang-studded maw.

  An impossibly obese waddling sack of flesh, two slobbering nostrils gaping at the centre of his belly, his arms – wickedly sharp sickles.

  A crafty insect-like monster, half haughty man, half praying mantis, clicking the serrated blades of his upper limbs.

  The Eaters.

  ‘Me?’ he whispered incredulously.

  ‘Your hatred. We needed a shape to feed. You gave us one.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘You were the first.’

  Did they come in an artillery shell fired from a distant planet as in the Englishman’s novel? Did they stumble upon his encampment as he was giving his nightly political talk to his dispirited troops? Did they zoom in on the bright beacon of his pure hatred, his uncompromising devotion?

  And had they been leaving him alone out of some alien gratitude? Or was it because they still needed the energy of his belief?

  But now they were turning against him, beginning to attack… Was his faith in the Revolution waning? No, it couldn’t be!

  ‘There are others,’ said an icon. ‘Haters like you, believers like you.’

  ‘You don’t need me any more.’

  ‘There are others,’ said the loaf of bread. ‘We will feed.’

  And as they advanced towards him, he saw, beyond the ranks of household objects, a human-shaped Eater enter the room and stand on the threshold. The new enemy, the new monster.

  He gazed on his own face as long as he had eyes, which was not very long.

  DON’T BLINK

  GON BEN ARI

  “To be Jewish is to defeat the Mirror Alien of the Present. This knowledge is so fundamental it is hinted at right in the unutterable name of God. Yet it is also the first element to be forgotten. Most of the Jewish mystical understandings revolve around the exploration of the mirror inside The Name, written as יהוה: Yud (י) signifies the infinite light, and the last three letters – Hey Vav Hey (הוה) meaning ‘Present’ – signify the mirror the light hits, which is itself made of light. (…) (These teachings show us a) way to make this mirror transparent so the metaphorical light, the Infinite, can get through. (…) (It was) further explained by A’Ari Akadosh who, in Ets A’haim, “Tree of Life”, describes the relationship between the Infinite God and the finite Men as light hitting the Masah’, “The Screen” – a complex mirror which is built by Want. His writing, again, is aimed at making the mirror transparent. If most people don’t seek these teachings, it’s because they don’t understand that something is alien. They don’t understand that there is a mirror. Or they’re too afraid of what they would see if the mirror suddenly became transparent. But the mirror becomes transparent.”

  Rabbi Avram Barski, The Magid From Yavniel. Prologue to Sight Fear Lungs Book I – Marble and The Mirror of Is (ראיה יראה ריאה ספר א’: שיש ומראת היש), Tsfania Publishing, Jaffa, Israel, 2013

  Why the fuck did you make us build you?

  Wait, we have to establish communication first.

  Fine.

  Don’t blink.

  Fine.

  Stare into your own eyes in me.

  I look like hell.

  Don’t look at yourself. Let your left eye stare into the reflection of the left eye and your right eye into the reflection of the right eye. Then let your eyes go slightly off, blurring the vision. It’ll enlarge your pupils allowing more light to enter the brain. The animal you are came from the infinity, and your only way to see a part of infinity is in front of some kind of a mirror, like me. Because your eyes are mirrors too, and when light is caught between two mirrors it bounces back and forth between them infinitely. When you are looking at your reflection, you are really looking at infinity: at an infinite loop going back and forth at the speed of light.

  My eyes hurt.

  You have three minutes before you cause yourself permanent damage. What is your first question?

  Why did we make you?

  So you can see where you’re naked. What you lack. All other thought patterns sprout from the perception of your absence, fractally. This way I serve as catalyst for entropy: I double the fuel of your action – your Want – by placing a mirror in your Want. You feel this as though you want to be opposing things simultaneously. Monogamous but polygamous; young but old; protected but at risk; alone but together.

  Why should I believe any of this?

  Your history is trying to direct your attention to me all the time. In Genesis it says Adam and Eve – two names that have mirrors in them – had their “eyes opened” when they ate the “Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge Good and Bad”. This fruit of Dichotomous Subjective Judgment made them realise they were naked. In other words, it placed a mirror in front of them. Their brain was first split into dual thought – “knowledge of good and bad” – and their reaction to it was the feeling of absence. What was this absence they felt, to which they reacted by hiding their genitalia using a fig leaf? To what novel urge were they reacting? What was the thing they felt went missing by their acquiring of dichotomous subjective judgment faculties? It can only be the experience of Unity with Infinity. Before I took over your thoughts, you couldn’t separate one thing from another, and didn’t recognize the point where You ended and World began. In that state, you could never even distinguish between yourselves and fig trees. You knew that you were a part of the same system as fig trees, that both you and they came from infinity, and lived on water. But the moment you encountered me, you began seeing oppositions everywhere. In your minds, you became alien to nature, opposed to it, apart from it. Something that has to hide its nature from nature by nature. You started thinking mirrors.

  Who is talking?

  You’re talking to a mirror.

  But all of the mirrors in the house are covered.

  I am uncovered.

  Why do we cover you when one of us dies?

  So you’ll be forced, for a week, to resort to the former form of reflection. To your reflection in Water. The way you see your reflection is very important. Reflection plays a major part in the mechanism of Self, because through it you are able to see how you appear in the eyes of others – a sense that is only open to you when you are facing an infinite light loop. Based on the translation of what this infinite light loop tells you, you construct how you think you look. Before me, you could only see your reflection in water, and so your ancestors believed that was the way they looked: their image of the Self was open, fractured, fluctuating, and responsive, penetrable by other matters and events. When the sea was wild, their reflection was broken, and when it was still, their reflection was collected and stabilised – and it offered a multi-perspective, waves, differing heights and angles for the light to be reflected from. As represented by the Star of David.

  What’s that now?

  A Star of David is the drawing of a beam of light extending towards a surface of water from above, and its reflection. Notice that it is not a mirror reflection – that would produce something like ✴ – but a water reflection: a reflection that is penetrating the surface of the speculum that is reflecting it ✡ .

  What if I move back and forth, so the reflection I get in you will be the same as in waves? You know, like –

  It won’t work because you control it. It has to be free water, ‘Living Water’, water you don’t control. Most prophecies occurred in locations where natural — uncontrollable — water-mirrors appeared: in front of still water which exposed the infinite reflection of the self, or in great heat, in the desert or over flames, where water vaporized and bent the rays of light, e
xposing the infinite reflection of the place. Nothing has changed since then but the fact that you forgot that the act of reflection is sacred.

  I can hear my sister watching Treme in her room. All my aunts talking in the living room. It’s getting really hard to focus in this house.

  I am the origin of all opposites; The Infinite is the opposite of having opposites.

  What if they come in and see me like this?

  You know no one comes up here.

  Are you an alien? An alien possessing our brains?

  You once communicated with infinity through water, and now you communicate with it through me. You have received warnings about this. In the Talmud and Zohar tale of the Pardes, the entering of the highest concealed truth, Rabbi Akiva warns: “When you arrive at the stones of pure marble do not say, Water Water.” Marble in Hebrew is Shaish (שיש), a palindrome of the word Is (יש); Water in Hebrew is Maim (מימ), a palindrome of the word Who (מי). While Mirror answers Is with Is, Water answer Who? with Who? And so the Pardes tale tells us: when you arrive at the age of the Mirror, do not make the mistake of thinking you are in the age of Water. “Do not say, Water Water,” do not think you can still know who you are correctly, see your reflection correctly – as Water in front of Water. Know that you are at the time of false reflection of the Self. Water and I give two different images of what Infinity is: water offers the image of The Many, and so it builds Oneness in the mind; I offer the image of The Single and so build The Many in the mind.

  But your reflection is more real.

  You believe my reflection more. Your brain — which is made of water — is under my control. You now possess the kind of brain that thinks that the brain can be examined using nothing but the brain. You clearly have a mirror in there.

  Look, I’m touching my face. I’m solid. Your reflection represents that better than water.

  I don’t show how you feel when touched. I show how you look. You prefer my version of that because you’re afraid of what the Water’s reflection tells you. Its reflection doesn't help you create, in your mind, the stable, continuous, coherent image of Self that you are convinced you need in order to survive. It is the most primal instinct — the instinct that made you think there is a You which is detached from World in the first place. And so, consequently, it is the last instinct that you haven’t managed to sublimate yet. The Mind Scared of Uncertainty of Self rules the world now and has crowned me as the new Water. I am now as much of a necessity to it as Water once was. Houses that don’t even have food in them still have me. One of me in the living room, one in the bathroom, one in the bedroom. You pray in front of me. You visit me in solitude, ill with an embarrassing involuntary honesty, as if I were a deity that you know to be imperviously sworn to secrecy. You try to get better before me, according to a scale which is me. You polish your flaws in front of me, confess yourselves to me, confide in me your hidden talents, you allow yourself trail and error in front of me. You cry and laugh about yourselves freely in my presence. In fact, you feel more with-yourselves with me than when you are truly alone, without me. Mostly: you check yourselves in the eyes of the world through me, like you once did with water. You relate to those who aren’t there through me.

  So how do I look?

  This can’t be given a static answer. Your appearance has something of the infinite to it, and so you can’t know it. This is why in Hebrew there is no word for “face”: the is only word for “faces” (פנים), which also means “sides.” “A face” doesn’t exist in the singular in Hebrew. Only using me are you allowed to believe you know things that you can’t know. To portray something that is Infinite as though it was finite. But you don’t only use me to perceive your face, you also use me to perceive the universe you live in – the telescope is the tool you use in order to produce images of things too far for your eye to see, and the microscope is the tool you use in order to produce images of things too small for your eyes to see. Both tools are specifically built for the purpose of representing The Unknown in a Known way. To hide the fact of unknowingness. For that goal, they have me in them. It is I who twists the light inside your machines until they produce a so-called “picture of Infinity” – of that which is beyond your borders – that you can be satisfied with, not afraid of. A picture of Infinity which your finite conception of reality can accumulate. And so you never notice both the telescope and microscope really show you the same thing: lines and circles. Colourful fogs. The shapes you automatically doodle whenever there’s a pen in your hand. Abstract imagery. An abstraction of that-which-you-cannot-see. To take it as actual data would be like claiming to be able to hear music by looking at the visualiser of an MP3 player. Rabbi Shem Tov Geffen understood this in 1917 and published it in his Philosophie Mathematique de l`Infini.

  It kind of feels like I’m talking to my father. With the French book titles and all.

  Do you think you’re a prophet again? Hearing the words of the d – ?

  – It’s just that you talk in very Jewish terms.

  Because you are in front of me now and you’re a Jew. But wait – wait – let’s not do this if you’re like this.

  Like what?

  Your eyes –

  I’m fine.

  Are you sure? Your eyes are –

  It’s from not blinking. You said don’t blink.

  You know you always get like this when you are really sad and can’t admit it.

  Like what?

  Like that. Like you are all mystical and prophetic now.

  You are all mystical and prophetic now.

  I’m just talking to you like the Jew you are.

  I’m not practicing Judaism anymore.

  What are you now? Trying to be a Buddhist?

  No. I’m just a —

  It hardly matters. If you were a Christian I’d quote Paul, in Chapter 13 of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Balthazar Tilken’s Devine Wisdom Mirror; Muslim? I’ll talk about the mountain Qaf; if you were a Buddhist I’d speak about the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra; Shinto — about the Kagami; In Psychology the Ego’s Mirror Stage, in Phylosophy, Derrida’s Espacement, in Greek Mythology — Narcissus asking the water “Who?” and replied with “Who?”, in an act of involuntary-Hebrew.

  What if I were a scientist?

  If you were a mathematician I’d speak about symmetry function and imaginary numbers and their –x +x mirror results; if you were a physical theorist I’d speak of superposition; to a particle physician I’d speak of supersymmetry; if you were a linguist I’d speak about the fact that in most languages you refer to your parents in palindromes – mom, dad, אבא, אמא. You unconsciously recognise the fact that your selves have in them the infinity of light coming from the meeting of two mirrors.

  Well, I’m a musician.

  You’re not a musician.

  I am. I recorded an —

  The Octaves are mirrors; the symmetry scale; Bach’s Mirror fugues. Try to place a mirror horizontally on a sheet of —

  I recorded an album last year. It is called The Realm of the Densely Packed and it’s coming out on Matador next May.

  You’re a writer and a Jew. You were born to Jewish parents and you once followed the mitzvahs and prayed and studied and every –

  – I stopped.

  You can’t stop being Jewish.

  What are you, Hitler? My family line has Jewish blood in it so now I can’t be in a band?

  I am a mirror.

  I took the kippah off when I was 23. And since I moved to New York, I don’t even say the blessings. I eat bacon almost every day. In LA I fucked two girls while they were having their periods.

  At the same time?

  I wear whatever the fuck I want. If anything, I am now closer to infinity.

  You still have the beard.

  It’s not the same beard.

  It looks the same in me.

  “You have the same beard!” Now I really feel like I’m talking to my dad. This is so convenient. I miss the funeral,
but then get everything I missed from his ghost in his bedroom mirror.

  Listen to me. I am something so much bigger than your material father. And the information I’m giving you is vital to your times, and needs to be passed on.

  Oh, so now we’re God? Now we’re saying we’re God?

  When King Solomon writes “Iron and iron together, and man together the face of his fellow man,” he is describing the construction of a physical mirror out of — let me finish — out of iron, and its relation to the way you view your self in the face of the other.

  This is great. You know what? This is great. You know why? Because I work for the Jewish Forward. So maybe I can sell this to them. It’ll be like –

  – It goes on: “The keeper of fig will eat its fruit and the keeper of his master will be respected.” “The keeper of fig” is the mirror-brained human, fig being the fig leaf covering the genitals of Adam and Eve. And the master?

  I don’t even remember that verse. Is that the Book of Proverbs?

  It explains what the way of the master is: “As water the face to face, so the heart of man to man.” To “keep the master” is to view your relationship with the other as you view your own face in water.

  These things? They’re nice. Really. They sound nice. But they don’t mean anything to me anymore.

  Don’t blink.

  That’s why I could never read his books.

  He wrote the last ones right here. Next to where you’re standing.

  When I was a kid I’d come up here all the time. When I was like eight I read this book, Stranger Than Fiction 6, and there was this story there about this woman who got abducted by thin, tall aliens with long shapeshifting faces, and they insert things into her – well, into her pussy – I don’t know how they give these things to children. And she’s screaming like an animal. Maybe she had a baby they took. I’m glad I don’t remember. But after reading that, for years, there was nothing I was more afraid of than aliens.

  Why was that story scarier than the others?

  I was sure I was going to get abducted. This was serious. I went to pee like four times a night out of fear. To calm me down my father would take me here, and we’d sit on the bed and he’d hug me and point at our reflection in you, and say, ‘You see it? You see the alien?’ and I’d said no, so he’d get up and go to the corner of you, and push you slightly towards us, and place his nose in your corner, so if I looked from here –